A quiet notice V2Melody closes at midnight on , Spanish time.

Closes

A note from Richard

V2Melody will close at midnight on 20 January 2028

This site has been a retirement project in musical poetry: poems chosen with care and set to music, offered freely for as long as it felt right to keep the garden open.

The work no longer holds the place it once did in my life. I have gone as far with it as I wish to go. Like a sand mandala, it was made to be completed and then released. I am not attached to its permanence, and I do not believe any of it needs to last beyond the time it was given. The poems were already here before I arrived and began to experiment with them. They will still be here when these musical experiments, and indeed myself, have been swept away, like the sand of a mandala. Nothing has been lost.

I want a simpler end to my life, days of simple love and enjoyment with my wonderful wife of 20 years. The work of maintaining a server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit that life.

From 4 November 2026 I will not be adding new poems or musical poems to the site.

The experimental music I am making now is on my Suno profile. Those pieces stay there, and are not added to this site.

Until midnight on 20 January 2028, Spanish time, everything remains available exactly as it is. That is when my VPS server contract comes to an end, and it will not be renewed. After that, the server will be switched off and the site will disappear.

The Mandala Is Finished explains this more fully.

Thank you to anyone who found a poem, a track, or a quiet moment here.

The pleasure was in the making.

Richard

Home › Glossary › Letter A

Affirmation

Philosophy
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Affirmation involves the acceptance or positive assertion of existence, values, or meaning. It often contrasts with negation or denial.

Detailed Definition
Philosophically, affirmation emphasises saying “yes” to life, existence, or truth, even amid uncertainty. In poetry, it appears in celebratory, resilient, or life-affirming tones, where the speaker embraces being despite suffering or ambiguity. Poets use affirmation to counter despair, often through vivid imagery and rhythmic vitality, aligning with existential and vitalist traditions.
Example
Example in poetry:
Nietzsche's "great affirmation" — saying yes to life, including its suffering — is enacted poetically in Rilke's "Duino Elegies" and "Sonnets to Orpheus," where the poet transforms lament into affirmation of existence's full tragic beauty; In Whitman's "Song of Myself," poetic affirmation operates philosophically as a counter to Cartesian doubt — the self is not proved but celebrated, affirmed through the accumulative force of the catalogue; Dickinson's slant affirmations — where belief and doubt coexist — demonstrate that poetic affirmation need not be simple or dogmatic but can be a complex, qualified philosophical stance; A poet responding to catastrophe might structure a poem as a series of negations that culminate in a single affirmation, using the philosophical logic of double negation to arrive at a hard-won yes; Hegel's dialectic, in which negation is the path to affirmation, runs through much modernist poetry — the affirmation at the end of Eliot's "Four Quartets" ("all shall be well") is reached only through sustained negation and despair; Audre Lorde's poetics of survival constitutes a philosophical affirmation of Black queer life against systemic negation, making the poem an act of existential and political assertion
Additional Notes
Affirmation in philosophy takes its strongest form in Nietzsche's concept of amor fati (love of fate) — the unconditional affirmation of existence, including its suffering. This is the philosophical content of the eternal recurrence: could you affirm your life so completely that you would will its eternal repetition? Nietzsche's affirmation is not naive optimism but a hard-won yes that passes through nihilism. Spinoza's earlier philosophy grounds affirmation in the conatus — each thing's striving to persist in its being is a form of self-affirmation. For Hegel, affirmation is reached through negation — the dialectical process in which the negative is sublated (aufgehoben) into a higher affirmation. For poets, affirmation as a philosophical concept challenges the easy celebratory lyric and asks what it would mean to affirm genuinely. Related terms: amor fati, negation, Nietzsche's eternal recurrence, dialectic, sublation.
Also Known As
Assertion Validation
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